Insight and encouragement from my heart to yours

Archive for October, 2011

How many times in life do you strive for perfection and continually fall short, only to give up altogether? If you are anything like me, eating healthy and exercising always begins again every Monday. I vow that I will yell less, hug more, work less, play more – only to quit because I am not living up to what I feel I should not only attain, but maintain.

A great friend of mine told me this saying: “Take it to the NEXT level,” and I think it’s perfect. It really made me stop and think. The idea is not to attain perfection; the idea is to only bring it up one notch, which in all honesty, who can’t achieve that?

Eating would look like chewing on a smaller portion instead of inhaling seconds and thirds and fourths. With exercising, that might mean instead of moving my body three days a week I strive for four, or instead of 20 minutes, I aim for 25.

For my marriage, that might mean tackling a household chore that my husband hates, or making his favorite dessert, or offering to run errands (with the kids) so he can have the house to himself.

With my kids, it could look like spending 10 extra minutes really listening to them or taking an extra 5 minutes in the morning to tuck a special note in their lunchbox. Maybe it is snuggling together, reading a favorite story, or coloring while watching a family friendly TV show.

It is going to look different for every single person, but for me, it frees me up from trying to be perfect and instead motivates me to work toward being my best. Putting on makeup even if I am just staying home for the day, drinking that extra glass of water instead of a whole pot of coffee, and the list goes on.

And who knows – it might be contagious. When I stop expecting unrealistic expectations from myself, maybe I will stop expecting that from my family too and they in turn will feel relaxed enough to personalize their choices, and “take it to the NEXT level” for themselves.

Quite a few of my friends lately have been going through some really rough times. I mean, real, gut-wrenching, ‘don’t want to get out of bed’ struggles.

I overheard someone tell one of them, “God does not give you more than you can handle.” Even though that message was meant to encourage, I personally could not really agree with that statement, and here is why. That implies that God is the one giving us the bad times, the hardships, the pain; and the God that I know and have come to believe in does not do that.

Instead, I like to think in terms of this sentence, “God does not allow more than we can handle.” That statement conjures up an image of God and Satan fighting head to head; Satan and his cronies being the ones that are trying to make life miserable and God only allowing them to go so far before He steps in and says, “Enough is enough.”

Another way to look at it would be seeing the picture of loving parents who willingly allow their child to suffer natural consequences of the sinful world, either through a mistake their child made himself or because of someone else’s mistake. The loving parent stays in the background, watching, monitoring; waiting for the child to cry out, “Help me” before stepping in. Does this mean the parents do not love their child? No, just the opposite. The parents love the child so much that they are willing to allow a little bit (or a lot) of hurt to help the child grow into the mature, responsible, independent person that child needs to become in order to reach his full potential.

Does God allow bad things to happen to good people? Yes, that is what free will is all about (which is a topic for another day). Do I believe that God purposefully gives people hard times, pain, and suffering? No, that belongs to sin and the Bible states very clearly that God hates sin and all that sin represents.

Having said that, will my friends’ lives be free from the pain they are suffering right now by saying “God does not allow more than we can handle?” instead of “God does not give more than we can handle?” No, not really. Their circumstances will not change overnight. However, instead of picturing a God who is purposefully causing pain as comes to my mind with the wording in the second sentence, I instead picture God as a loving father, keeping the enemy from completely destroying my friends’ lives (or mine) when reading the first sentence. I picture God protecting, sheltering, and only allowing so much; enough to help them (or me) grow and reach their potential instead of being completely destroyed by the enemy who is trying to do just that.

I hope this encourages not only my friends who are going through some rough times, but anyone else reading this who needs extra hope today. God is not the enemy; He is the One keeping us from being completely destroyed when the bad times inevitably come.